So Gecko and I have been doing some interesting work with WordPress this weekend. My wife and I visited him and the lovely Arwen on Friday, drank too much wine, and when we woke up in the morning had a lovely Logitech USB headset, originally meant for a Sony PlayStation, sitting in our laps. We also had fuzzy memories of barked instructions to start "podcasting". Wha'?
First, we had to get the headset working. On my box (Debian Testing with a 2.6.9 kernel) it was a simple matter of getting ALSA modules compiled. Since I still hadn't got around to getting my sound card going after the big move, this had the pleasant bonus of being able to listen to music again.
When everything was done, I was able to run:
arecord -D plughw:Headset | oggenc - -o foo.ogg & sleep 60 killall arecord
and have a tasty OGG file at the end of it. Sweet!
But what about Ms Topo's computer? She's running RH9, and I had no interest in picking this weekend to migrate her to something newer. I knew (well, okay, I Googled and found out) that RH didn't do ALSA, so that left me with the fun of trying to bolt it on. I tried following these instructions, and it didn't work: whenever I tried to modprobe the new ALSA modules, I got lots of "unresolved symbol" errors. NFG.
Well, what about a new kernel? Could try upgrading to 2.6.9, right? Nope: RH uses initrd when booting, and I've never wrapped my head around that. But guess what? When booting back into 2.4, kudzu found and configured the USB headset automagically. Teach me to underestimate RH...
Okay, so that part solved. Next part was to figure out what the hell "podcasting" is. And for the love o' Linus, it's just a URI in an RSS 2.0 feed that points to a thing: an image, an MP3 file, whatever. They call it an enclosure, but it's just a fucking link! RSS is the new HTML. Somebody, somewhere, is going to figure out how to do TCP over RSS, and I won't know whether to laugh or cry.
(Hey! Google finds no pages with the phrase "TCP over RSS". You heard it here first, kids.)
But back to our story. So how the hell do you get an enclosure in your RSS 2.0 feed? Well, if you're using the ever-lovin' WordPress, you can either get the Alpha nightly releases, or you can make some judicous modifications to a few files. I backed up the originals, copied the others into place, made the right changes to the database, and baaaaaaaaaaaaaam!
Last step: oh yeah, an MP3. (Stupid patented file formats...) Quick look around found Audacity, and holy crap is that cool. The first time I started it, I got a little popup:
There was an error initializing the audio i/o layer. You will not be able to play or record audio. Error: Host error.
but turning off XMMS fixed that right up. I quickly recorded two tracks, exported the mess to MP3, put it up on the server, and hey-ho, let's go! Sir Gecko checked it out, and it worked on his iPod. What is it with Apple people, anyway?
Next step: Topo and Gecko do the ADD show. Watch for updates.